Eastern European soul food, for me, begins in Bangkok. Where else would one expect to find an expert on chicken paprikash? My family’s last surviving one lives there, with a street cat called Mango and her half-Thai, quarter-Indian, quarter-Hungarian-Jewish, entirely American grandson.

I don’t understand the point of garden visits. Why do ordinary people, the owners of mere balconies and tiny yards, torment themselves by touring other people’s grand estates? Nut trees, stables, ancestral compost heaps: I need no reminder of what I am missing.

For most of us, apartment dwellers and city types, houseplants are an admission of defeat. We look wistfully at plants in the supermarket—tendrils and fronds, furry flaps, spines and holes and soft neon shoots—persuading ourselves that they might bring us comfort.

Only two years ago, when I was finishing my memoir of gardening obsession, “Rhapsody in Green,” I claimed that I had no time for houseplants. Prickly, diminutive, macramé-reliant: I’d rarely been less tempted by anything.

Ordinarily, my garden and I are embarrassing to be around. I can’t keep my hands off it; visitors, work, and children are all mere obstacles on the path of true pleasure.

Oh, America: blue breakfast cereals and string made of fruit are not perfectly normal childhood foodstuffs. Your young are corrupted by pleasure. Unfortunately, I was too.

I say “autumn,” you say “fall.” Obviously, I’m right. But maybe we can compromise with “harvest,” the season’s traditional name. At this time of year, anyway, what one really needs is adjectives, and “fall-like” just won’t do.

Like virtually every bookish child in the Western world, I inherited certain lessons from Laura Ingalls Wilder. Reading the “Little House on the Prairie” series as a girl, I believed three things: that my future womanly waist would be small enough for Pa’s hands to encircle; that snow could freeze maple syrup into delightful snacks; and that the secret to security and happiness lay in preserving fruits and vegetables for winter.

My Hungarian-Czech grandmother, an otherwise goodhearted and generous woman, had a notoriously lax attitude toward property rules: bank pens, ashtrays, and hospital slippers all were fair for the taking.

Don’t worry; it’s perfectly normal. You live in a city, but nurse secret fantasies of growing your own supper: brimming handfuls of sweet green peas, squeakingly fresh spinach; new potatoes rolling like unearthed treasure over the soil.

Once upon a time, like most sane people, I was utterly uninterested in gardening. I wasted my time and money on reasonable things: secondhand books, dramatic spices, jackets that I hoped might transform me into the well-groomed and self-possessed novelist I still intend, one day, to become.